Markham’s Comments

In the United States, the concept of amending the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (an act that has been in the news lately) to allow counter-hacking to protect one's property has been the subject of debate. In addition, remember that in 2001, the some copyright owners' organizations drafted an amendment to the CFAA that was proposed to be attached to the USA Patriot Act to allow a copyright owner to hack computers where unauthorized copies of the owner's works might be found. The proposed amendment would have created an exception to the CFAA to allow hacking by copyright owners (pragmatically, a limitless universe of people)to search and disable the unauthorized use of copyrighted works. It also included a provision that limited the hackers' liability if unintentional collateral damage was done to a user's computer in the process.